Ottawa to host UFC Fight Night in June

LAS VEGAS — The first UFC event on Canadian soil in 2016 will take place in Ottawa on Saturday, June 18, with a UFC Fight Night event.

UFC officials have confirmed the news with Postmedia, and an official announcement will come from UFC president Dana White on Friday at the organization’s “Unstoppable” press event in Las Vegas prior to the UFC 196 weigh-ins.

A venue and main event for the fight card are still to be determined, but broadcast details have been confirmed. The event will air on TSN5 and RDS2 in Canada and FS1 in the United States.

“I’m excited to tell you that we’re going to be coming to the beautiful nation’s capital, one of my favourite cities in the country,” said Tom Wright, the executive vice-president of UFC Canada, Australia and New Zealand, speaking with Postmedia Thursday.

“We’ve always wanted to come to our nation’s capital and we know that Ontario is a strong market for us.

“(Ottawa) is a nice distance between Montreal and Toronto and Kingston, it’s a great sports town, and we can’t think of a better city to mark the 20th UFC event in Canada than our nation’s capital.”

Ottawa becomes the ninth Canadian city to host a UFC event. Montreal leads the way, having hosted seven pay-per-view events, followed by Vancouver and Toronto, which have played host to the premier mixed martial arts promotion in the world three and four times, respectively.

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In recent years, the UFC has broken from its initial pattern of only bringing pay-per-view events to major Canadian markets, adding televised Fight Night events such as the one headed to Ottawa into the rotation.

The Ultimate Fighter: Nations Finale was held in Quebec City in April 2014 prior to organization making its inaugural trip to the Maritimes in October 2014 with an event in Halifax. Last August, surging featherweight Max Holloway earned his seventh straight victory in the main event of the UFC’s debut in Saskatoon.

“I think we’ve got some terrific fans in all parts of this country and if you have a big country like ours and you want to take your sports and your athletes and your brand to as many parts of it, you need to have these kinds of opportunities,” Wright said of bringing the smaller televised events to some of this country’s less populous markets.

“Halifax was a great event, but we’re not going to get a pay-per-view to Halifax,” added the former CFL commissioner.

“I think it’s great that we’ve got these opportunities to take our sport into some of the smaller communities. They may be small in population, but we know we’ve got some great fans and it’s a great opportunity for us to once again demonstrate that the best way to experience our sport is to do it at a live event.”

Whenever the UFC brings the Octagon beyond the borders of the United States, it tends to load up those fight cards with athletes from the host country or region, so expect to see a healthy number of Canadian competitors making the walk to the eight-sided cage in Ottawa later this year.

That means the possibility of seeing fighters such as veteran Patrick Cote, who has won three straight to climb the welterweight rankings, Montreal native and recent title challenger Valerie “Trouble” Letourneau and rising light heavyweight prospect Misha Cirkunov, who picked up his second straight stoppage victory in February at UFC Fight Night: Hendricks vs. Thompson in Las Vegas.

While a main event has yet to be confirmed, Ariel Helwani reported on Wednesday’s edition of UFC Tonight that a fight between Canadian Rory MacDonald and Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson is currently being discussed.

Thompson is coming off an impressive first-round win over former champ Johny Hendricks and MacDonald is returning for the first time since his 2015 Fight of the Year loss to Robbie Lawler at UFC 189, which makes this potential pairing a clash of welterweight title contenders and potentially an outstanding headliner for the UFC’s debut in Ottawa.

Earlier in the year, Wright said that the UFC plans to hold three events in Canada in 2016 and he confirmed again Thursday that the plan remains unchanged.

“We’re still committed to three events in Canada, the first one being Saturday, June 18, in Ottawa.”

Expect fight announcements for the June event in Ottawa to start trickling in over the course of the next few weeks.

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